This application comes to us courtesy of our official distributor in India. They have a customer who is a bottler of a major, worldwide brand of soft drink. This customer was having difficulty with an application where they needed to blow rinse water off the neck of a soda bottle to prepare it for a date code.

The customer was utilizing (3) of what I will call a “duck foot” nozzle. You have probably seen them before. They are those cheap, plastic nozzles that are about 50 mm. wide at one end and have a 1/4 pipe thread on the other. They are usually blue or yellow in color and use about 26 SCFM @ 80 psig. Anyway, the customer was trying to use these plastic nozzles with very little success as the date code was still smearing due to water still being present in the area where they were printing.

Our distributor was invited to the plant to review the application and “see what could be done”. The distributor left the customer with one Model 120021 (1-1/4″ Super Air Amplifier) for trial. The customer installed the Super Air Amplifier and operated it at 80 PSIG.  Upon our distributor’s return to the plant for a follow up visit, they found the customer had been operating non-stop without any interruption to the date code printing application. As an added bonus, use of the Super Air Amplifier saved the customer 70 SCFM of air volume that could either be claimed as straight energy savings or used for another application. Not bad for a solution that cost less than $150.00. 

If you figure the air savings, the Super Air Amplifier will pay for itself in less than 150 hours of operation. If you figure a two shift operation (80 hours/week) that is less than two weeks to pay back the cost of the Super Air Amplifier. And, this is just one instance of a blow-off application. Think about your own plant and how many places you have something similar set up.

Neal Raker
Application Engineer
nealraker@exair.com